Survival Without Renewal: Abjection, Ecological Stagnation, and Suspended Futurity in Missouri Williams’s The Doloriad

Abstract

This article examines Missouri Williams’s The Doloriad as a post-apocalyptic novel that reconfigures survival as ecological stagnation rather than renewal. While survival in post-apocalyptic fiction is often associated with endurance, futurity, and the possibility of reconstruction, Williams presents a damaged world in which life continues through bodily corrosion, reproductive enclosure, and temporal suspension. Drawing on Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection, Stacy Alaimo’s concept of trans-corporeality, and Claire Colebrook’s reflections on posthuman temporality, the article argues that The Doloriad transforms survival into a compromised ecological condition. The Family’s bodies appear as permeable and exposed sites where environmental damage becomes materially inscribed, while reproduction extends catastrophe across generations rather than opening toward ethical or ecological renewal. In the novel, children inherit the aftermath instead of representing a regenerated future, and narrative form mirrors this stagnation through repetition, fragmentation, and suspended progression. By reading abject embodiment, reproductive futurity, and narrative temporality together, the article shows how Williams challenges consoling accounts of survival after catastrophe. The Doloriad ultimately separates persistence from hope, suggesting that life after ecological collapse may endure as exposure, coercion, and damaged continuation. In doing so, the novel contributes to Environmental Humanities and post-apocalyptic studies by questioning whether survival itself can preserve the very conditions of harm it appears to overcome.